Dec 5, 2013

Extra, Extra! Scientists misunderstand own research!

Look below the line on any newspaper
article dealing with women’s equality, and you’re guaranteed to come across at
least a couple of comments condescendingly reminding you that there are differences
between men and women. Sometimes it’s accompanied by the wink-wink-nudge-nudge “apart
from the obvious, haha!”, sometimes it’s a sort of exasperated superiority at
the author’s sheer silliness. Often, it will appeal to scientific authority along the lines
of “research has repeatedly have shown”, or my personal favourite, “it’s proven by science”.

And frankly, you can’t
really blame people, can you? Quite apart from the success of books (and the
myths they engender) like “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” and “TheEssential Difference”, which one could say simply capitalize on a pre-existing
thirst to have gender stereotypes bolstered by the borrowed authenticity of
science, when actual new research does come out, it’s invariably reported in
the press in ways that hysterically emphasize the parts of the findings that
fit with prevailing notions about the difference between men and women, and
usually utterly ignore the rest.

The reason this week’s
neurobabble scoop is worthy of notice though is not that the newspapers
trumpeted it as the final proof that men are better at reading maps (and should
therefore presumably continue to dominate the higher echelons of politics and
business, not that I’ve ever seen the connection, personally), but that in
doing so they did not misrepresent the researchers’ own conclusions.

Which is quite
remarkable, considering that the work actually didn’t turn up the results the
scientists say it turned up.

Two excellent pieces written by people who have the
patience to trawl though the newsprint babble point out two key ways in which
this research did no, in fact, demonstrate that behavioural differences between
men and women are explained by difference in the brain.

This piece, by Cordelia Fine, brings to light the
interesting fact that the data set these researchers used doesn't show any
measurable behavioural differences:

To give a sense of the huge overlap in behaviour between
males and females, of the twenty-six possible comparisons, eleven sex
differences were either non-existent, or so small that if you were to select a
boy and girl at random and compare their scores on a task, the “right” sex
would be superior less than 53% of the time.

Even the much-vaunted female advantage in social cognition,
and male advantage in spatial processing, was so modest that a randomly chosen
boy would outscore a randomly chosen girl on social cognition – and the girl
would outscore the boy on spatial processing – over 40% of the time.

As for map-reading and remembering conversations, these
weren’t measured at all.

And this one, by my friend Paul Harper-Scott, winkles out
the hidden detail that they didn’t find any structural brain differences in
children, either:

Male and female brains
showed few differences in connectivity up to the age of 13, but became more
differentiated in 14- to 17-year-olds.

That really is very interesting, to anyone willing to pause
for thought. Let us allow that the observed differences in adult brains are
significant, and that brain science is capable of communicating details of
value (though there is considerable scientific scepticism on this point). Those
differences are not manifested until the age of 14–17. It follows that the
assumption that girls and boys below that age are ‘essentially’ different,
‘because their brains are wired differently’ is unsupported by the evidence. It
is wrong to suggest that boys and girls have a ‘natural’ difference, which can
be traced to brain design, because the study does not support such a claim. On
the contrary, if we think that gendered difference is explicable only by brain
design, we ought to conclude from this study that there should be no
difference, at least no difference occasioned by brain design, between boys and
girls.

In other words, this new and exciting research, reported to “finally
prove” why men and women behave differently because of their different brains, didn’t
prove either that

a) men and women behave differently,

b) they have innately different
brains,

c) that there’s even a connection between the two.

And yet not only the gullible science journalists and
credulous public, but even the people looking at the data themselves,
interpreted these non-findings in a way that reinforces the dominant
stereotypes about men and women in a post-industrial liberal democracy.

It’s hard not to feel like the world has gone just a little
bit delusional; like we’re arguing with someone about the colour of the sky,
pointing to it and going “but look, look at it, it’s right there!” only to have
them give us a pitying glance and say “yes, it is indeed yellow, like we told you. Your problem?”

It’s not up to science to prove or disprove the stereotypes
about the sexes and gendered patterns of behaviour, in other words, because as long ago as the 90's, people like Stephen Jay Gould wrote about the persistent under-reporting of brain research studies whose findings showed little or no structural or operational difference between the sexes (over 90% of all such studies, if I recall the quotation correctly). This stuff is not new, and we can't leave it to the assumed objectivity of scientists to debunk decades (centuries!) of bunk. It’s up to
feminists to get it through these people’s thick lab coats that there are no
differences worth speaking of, and make them get down to the more interesting
work of trying to explain why we so persistently believe there are. Because ingrained attitudes manufacture their own brand of "evidence", in spite of and in the face of everything that we can justifiably advance as fact.

5 comments:

Thank you so much for writing this post. That news article bothered me a bit (particularly because I found it on the Guardian and so I couldn't blame it on right-wing conservatives). Having read the "Delusions of Gender" by Cordelia Fine though I instinctively thought that I should not accept those claims without actually looking very closely at the study myself. I didn't so thanks for doing that and writing this post.

"It’s up to feminists to get it through these people’s thick lab coats that there are no differences worth speaking of, and make them get down to the more interesting work of trying to explain why we so persistently believe there are."

Err no it isn't. That's not how science works at all. Because we don't yet understand the brain or how it works in anything more than a quite superficial manner (such as a level where we could associate brain activity with specific thought) we cannot as yet say if there is any significant differences. We simply do not know. Certainly making statements like this is akin to biology in 1930s Russia trying to prove Lisenkoism because that's what Marxist theory requires to be true. It is not science' job to prove or disprove feminist theory or indeed anything else.

Now it may be that there are significant sex differences in the brain (at all ages) that we don't have the tools to determine yet. Or there may be none. If there are they may be environmentally determined or they may be as a result of hormonal differences. These differences may be significant at the level of the personality, or they may not be. Some organs do differ because of sex (skeletal muscle in men in considerably denser in muscle fibre for example so is about 30% stronger mass for mass) or it may not (kidney function is identical AFAIK).

All that can be taken from this study is there may be some differences between the sexes post-puberty, but nothing can be taken as to if that means anything or not. As the brain extensively rewires itself in adolescence the lack of apparent difference before puberty may mean something, or it may not. We do not know.

Personally what I always end up taking from these studies is the appalling inability of the general public to understand normal Gaussian distribution curves. I'd be sort of surprised if there wasn't some sex bias of some type in distribution of brain function, but like most traits it's going to be highly complex only distinguishable at a statistical level and pretty meaningless on an individual basis. A bit like the observation that men are taller than women, but much, much more subtle.